SALVE ROMA! A Felidae Novel - By Akif Pirincci Page 0,52

tags to me. Out of courtesy, I didn’t want to interrupt her of course. We had reached the Forum by now, but followed outlying trails, so that the flow of tourists didn’t get in our way. If I hadn’t lost track in this rubble jungle, we must be on our way to the Arch of Titus again.

»Every newly arriving face gets scanned and matched with the biometrically recorded mugshots of previously convicted crooks. But even the biometric data of innocent people won’t be deleted as they are hypothetic first offenders.«

»Fortunately, we don’t fall in any of these categories. For animal shapes the program is probably blind«, I replied with a cheeky attitude.

»Not at all«, Sancta said unaffectedly, as if it was the most casual thing in the world. I just wanted to shrivel up from embarrassment, or at least blush to a bordeaux-violet, if that would be possible for our kind. As at the thought that we had secretly been filmed at our passionate fling at dawn made me tense up so much that I almost turned into one of the statues we kept passing. Sancta though didn’t seem to mind that she was watched at every turn. Why would she, having grown up like this?

Close to the Arch of Titus my lover suddenly sidestepped into an area that was covered with wild bushes. We crawled through dense undergrowth, stopped and squeezed us through sprawling roots like flounders, and finally we battled liana-like plant curtains, which stood comparison to a real jungle. Suddenly our paws unexpectedly stood on glass. It was bulletproof glass, about 2 inches thick, rectangular and so broad that one could easily have built a house on it.

My eyes became aware of a high-tech-center that was hidden in the ground. The faces of the newly arrived visitors appeared on countless monitors on the wall. The moving pictures froze in a matter of seconds, and a program calculated the measures of specific facial features and analyzed color of skin and hair on the basis of bright point of lights and flashing lines. After that the faces changed into abstractions consisting of rough structures and blinking dots and disappeared in a window in the upper part of the monitor. On other monitors numerical series scrolled through. On the next one though a special program, which recognized solid geometric patterns, compared the current look and the position of the single ruin elements with the old data from archival footage without a single break. This total electronic monitoring proceeded almost automatically, as there was only a guard in a blue uniform sitting at the monitoring desk with the many controllers and keys, who now and then brought himself to get a call and used to the rest of the time to yawn of boredom.

»Now you know the secret why the Roman empire will stay at its ancestral place for ever and always, Francis«, Sancta said, and her face couldn’t hide the pride in her master and his thaumaturgic feats.

»This is all very impressive indeed, Sancta«, I replied. »Compared with your Umberto, George Orwell was a fanciless mediocrity. Do you maybe know in which technical field he did research before he turned towards religion?«

»I believe he thought of some funny things.«

»Funny things?«

»He owns a sparse cabin underneath the broken bridge next to the Ponte Rotto. But his real home is a Volkswagen transporter that probably dates back to the Gallic War. Among other things, he keeps the few mementos of his former life in there. I once went there and found yellowed magazines and sheets with scientific notes under the junk that is scattered all of the place.«

»So?«

»Well, like I already said, at that time he used to work at silly things. For example, he considered the question of whether the coating of water-repellent plant leaves can be synthesized and how the result can be converted to modern car paint. Stuff like that.«

In a row of columns at the threshold to the Piazza del Colosseo it eventually was time to say farewell. After leaving the hidden glass bunker Sancta had guided me here unerringly. The elliptic square sort of built the end of the Forum Romanum. The Colosseum towered in its center. My lover couldn’t hide that she was afraid to leave her ghost land and just set just a single paw outside its borders. Although the cobblestoned square was a care-free zone, which served as collecting point for tourists and as an elegant promenade for walkers, nervousness make itself at home